Black Mage: Does Thomas Mulcair have a good shot of winning the next Canadian election? Is it a better/worse shot than any of the other NDP contenders?

I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.

supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?

Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)

New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.

Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*

JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?

Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?

Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.

Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.

You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.

And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.

What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…

…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.

Rob and Doug Ford are doing a radio show. So I am liveblogging it for Torontoist.

Look, I know each week a conservative politician in Canada will open their mouth and say something stupid and be the Worst Politician In Canada (for that week). That’s how the news cycle works. But I don’t want people to lose perspective. Yes, Rob and Doug Ford are incompetent and ignorant. Yes, John Baird is a contentious blowhard who probably shouldn’t be in any diplomatic role, much less Minister of Foreign Affairs. Yes, Stephen Harper is a smug robot who has to work overtime to keep his contempt for Canadians’ general predilection for egalitarianism under the surface. Yes, Jason Kenney is an embarrassment who frequently says and does stupid things.

But not a one of these people is worse than Vic Toews, because as bad as they might be, they are all still occasionally capable of doing good things in public service. Not so Toews, whose track record speaks for itself: he has constantly and consistently advocated for bad public policy. When Vic Toews was made Minister of Justice, he attempted to pass a three-strikes law (which was obvious at that time to be extremely bad policy), advocated for lowering the age of criminal responsibility from twelve to ten, and added police representatives to judicial advisory boards (a move that practically the entire judiciary complained could cause severe imbalance in the judicial nomination process). He also very likely “forgot” to inquire closely into the Karlheinz Schrieber affidavit.

As President of the Treasury Board, his job was one of government oversight, which meant that Toews introduced the new Lobbying Act, which actually makes it easier for lobbyists to arrange unreported meetings between government officials and lobbyists’ clients. Toews also scrapped the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, which was a useful and cheap tool for Canadian citizens to exercise oversight over public documents.

And now, of course, as Public Safety Minister, Toews is demanding that ISPs install equipment to track their users and that such information be available to the government without warrant. Why? Because of child pornographers, of course! The flood of child pornography that we all know threatens to drown the nation apparently demands it, according to Toews.

Again: Vic Toews is the worst politician in Canada. Any politician can say stupid or thoughtless things (Justin Trudeau does so regularly). It is quite another thing, however, to consistently advocate for and draft, and execute bad or actively harmful government policy. Vic Toews does so and he has done so for most of his government career, in service of an authoritarian ideology that is at odds with the right-wing small-government ethos for which he so frequently agitates (and which belies his political career, now in its seventeenth year). To use a line I have used before: if Vic Toews agrees with you about anything, consider strongly the possibility that you are wrong about everything.

UPDATE: And just as I write this, up pops Vikileaks on Twitter, making a point about personal privacy by publishing excerpts from affidavits in Toews’ divorce case.

Macleans has been getting a lot of hits the past week for its 99 Ways The Government Wastes Your Money series of posts, which is about what you’d expect from Macleans, a magazine that for the most part started downhill in the late 90s and never looked back, instead deciding to celebrate itself for championing free speech by publishing Mark Steyn’s vaguely racist twaddle instead of, and this is just a thought, publishing a counter to it.1

But, even by the standard of “look at all the ways government wastes your money” articles, this one is really amazingly slapdash. First off, it’s just a laundry list of governmental spending at all levels: municipal, provincial, federal, et cetera. This makes it sort of meaningless, because the article isn’t a complaint about how a specific government wastes money. It’s a general complaint. It’s like writing “99 Reasons We Hate Cloudy Days And Not Looking at Puppies.” It’s generic and doesn’t actually describe any specific solution. It’s just free-form bitching. When Jim Demint writes Here Is 350 Instances Of Government Spending That I Hate, Vol. 6, he at least makes sure to stick to the federal government, because then he can actually use his findings – intellectually bankrupt as they may be – to make something resembling a point.

Worse, it’s free-form bitching that’s all over the place. The article conflates government spending that is wasteful (giving a high-paid management official an enormous pension, for example) and government spending that is malfeasant (the Tories spending government funds to advertise their policy initiatives in the run-up to the most recent election) and government spending on subsidies, economic stimulus and infrastructure that the writers even admit might have purpose, but hey it’s a recession and we all need to tighten our belts and yadda yadda yadda (spending money to build a footbridge in rural Quebec). This is ridiculously sloppy. It’s getting offended at the government spending money not because the writers object to the government spending in any particular way (wastefully, borderline illegally, to promote policies with which they disagree, whatever) but because whatever, it’s gubmint spendin’ and gubmint is baaaaaaad.

But worst of all, it’s free-form bitching without context. We ran a budget deficit of about $33 billion in Canada in fiscal 2010-2011. The spending Macleans is bitching about adds up to maybe a couple of hundred million dollars, using the most generous math and the largest figures for each item. But it`s worth remembdering that the Tories`GST cut is probably responsible for at least $10 billion of that deficit. If runaway government spending existed – and that is a premise Macleans has most certainly not proven – it is to some extent a manufactured problem. Not acknowledging this is bad journalism. But these days, unfortunately, one expects little more from a cover story in Macleans.

1. Seriously, the constant backpatting by Andrew Coyne during the whole Steyn thing was kind of nausea-inducing. [↩]

My “Villain” entrant in Torontoist’s 2011 Heroes and Villains is sort of a repeat.

The Toronto Police shut down the Occupy Toronto encampment in St. James Park this morning, and from 3 AM through to about 8 I was onsite liveblogging it for Torontoist.

I have to say, I feel vaguely robbed by the lack of a riot. Dear police and protestors: next time I have to get up at 3 AM to cover your potential clash, please have at least a small riot or something, okay? Not a big one, just… something? This was so painfully civil it felt like somebody’s idea of a parody, “Canadian Protest Riot” or something. The police were respectful and helpful, the protesters were largely polite and cooperative (okay, there was one guy who was barefoot and half-dressed who kept taunting the cops and getting up in their faces, and honestly I don’t think it would have been controversial if the police had arrested him, but they didn’t), and the media were all over the place basically ensuring that both sides were as amiable as possible and kibbitzing with both sides.

I mean, nice to get back to that after the G20, don’t get me wrong. But why couldn’t we do this at, like, noon or something so we could all sleep in?

TOrontoist asked me to weigh in on Toronto’s new proposed cycling bylaw, so I did just that. Because that is how I roll. (On a bike, you see.)

My election post-mortem is up at Torontoist, along with the election liveblog from last night.

Torontoist’s provincial election endorsement – most of which I wrote – is up for you to read. It is, perhaps, somewhat predictable, but you have to admit that Torontoist didn’t just let me write “FUCK TIM HUDAK” one thousand times in a row. Which was tempting.

My obituary for Jack is up at Torontoist.

Over at Torontoist, I dueled with Patrick Metzger over the issue of allowing corporate advertising inside of schools.

In a recent tweet, Michelle Bachmann’s campaign wrote:

Lesson in economic recovery: Consider Canada. No stimulus & unemployment is 20% lower than US.

Uh, guys – we did have a stimulus. We passed stimulus in 2009 as part of the budget, at practically the same time that the USA did: $40 billion in spending and $20 billion in tax cuts for a total of $60 billion in stimulus spending and cuts. Now, our budget was only $274 billion CDN in expenditures, so that $60 billion represented about 22% of our overall budget, whereas the USA’s stimulus of $900 billion measured against its expenditures of $3.5 trillion USD represented about 26% of its budget, so percentagewise our stimulus was a bit smaller than yours, granted – but then again, thanks to strict banking regulations that most of the world didn’t have, we didn’t take nearly the hit that the United States did from the financial collapse of 2008.

So basically Michelle Bachmann is wrong. I know, you’re having trouble processing such an idea! But that is in fact the case.

My election aftermath post is up at Torontoist.

Also, I don’t think Harper and the Tories will make dramatic shifts to the right on social policy: I genuinely don’t think they’re that stupid, and I suspect if they tried there are enough newly minted Tory MPs that would break ranks (and Layton is smart enough to get them to do it), because regardless of party unity the public would be 90% against, say, banning same-sex marriage or criminalizing abortion. But they’re definitely going to bring in some horrible fiscal policies (income splitting, for example), and destroy a lot of effective government regulation, and let industry write laws benefiting them (man, the telecoms in this country are so happy today) and nothing’s gonna stop that.

I’m liveblogging the federal election results tonight with the rest of the Crack Torontoist Election Team Central Brigade here.

Torontoist made its endorsement of a party in the federal election today. I wrote it.